Google makes URLs Goo.gl

Article No :452 | July 8, 2011 | by Constantinos Demetriadis

Google announced that they're officially moving into the realm of "URL shortening services," but not for the public. Their fancy new short URL, Goo.gl will be available—at least for the time being—only through their products, like the Google toolbar and FeedBurner.

I'm realy curious to see how the rest of the URL shortening services will react if Goo.gl goes public.

PS: I know for sure that ours (uxm.ag) will be safe, since it will always be private ;)

Maybe not but Twitter is imo the biggest reason why those services exists, I think it is our responsability as User experiences professionals to publish some articles on the problem recommending that URLs displayed in Twitter should no longer be part of the 140 chars allowed but be considered as a tweet attachement.

You are absolutely right. I use bit.ly URLs for Twitter and Facebook, but so far, no where else. I suppose you could use bit.ly for their link tracking...but I don't, so who else gets any use out of it?

URL shortening services are destroying the web. Reading an URL should answer the user question "where am I going if I click on this?". URLs should be meaningful as recommended by Google SEO.
This is a basic user experience need.

I agree with Thierry. This goes back to the same annoying problem of needing to remember all those Unix commands and their syntax. This is not even close to what users will enjoy. They want simple, easy to remember URLs that tell them where they go. Not only for internet-savvy people, but we are making this tough for our parents who are innocently using the internet to their best way possible.

I am already seeing how people would HATE this change, unless the browsers support the usual way and change it internally to however short a length it needs while sending the response to the server.

Their strength point would be using it automatically to URLs entered via Gmail/Gtalk/Wave..etc. Other than that, URL shortening services are almost the same, with two differenciative factors:
1-durability: we don't want our tiny URLs to be broken when service disappear (like when it was going to happen to http://tr.im).
2-Being short (apparently): http://j.mp is much better than http://tinyurl.com because it's owned by "bit.ly" which looks like it will hang around for a while (durable), and it's much shorter (11 spaces against 18 spaces)